"… did you know that 60% of measurements and statistics start with a 1, 2 or 3? Distance to the sun, 150,000,000km, starts with a 1. Height of Everest, 29,000ft, starts with a 2. Density of barium, 3.59g/cm3, starts with a 3. You might think that I am (2008 Italian cherry production, 134,407 tonnes, starts with a 1), but if you scan the financial pages of this newspaper then you will see that most numbers do indeed start with a 1, 2 or 3. This eccentricity of the digits is dubbed , because it was made famous by , a physicist at the in New York. He, like the rest of us, had both previously assumed that the starting digit of numbers would be evenly spread among all the numbers from 1 to 9, so he was shocked by his own discovery."